The downtime will be worth it, though, with the game introducing a new map (Coastline), new weapon skins and two new operators - Mira and Jackal.

The map will be free to everyone immediately, but the two new operators will be exclusive to Rainbow Six Siege Year 2 Season pass holder for a week.

Following that week, other players will be able to buy them with renown currency or R6 Credits.

Rainbow Six Siege - Operation Velvet Shell Screenshots

Operation Velvet Shell, the first free update of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege Year 2, will be available for Xbox One, Sony Playstation®4 and Windows PC from February 7th, 2017.

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Some of the other big changes include:

PERSONALISED PLAY BUTTON

In the newly designed menu system, you will notice that the primary button on your home screen menu is a little different. It will remember your last played option and will appear there. So for example, if you last played a Ranked match, clicking the play button will send you queueing into a Ranked match. If you want to change up to Terrorist Hunt or Casual, you can click the arrow to the right of the button or select the “Play” tab in order to get the other options.We hope this change will make it even easier to get into the game of your preferred game mode.DYNAMIC CHALLENGE DISPLAY

In the new menu display, you will find a new way to track and manage your challenges. Your progression for each challenge will now be updated in this button. You will see several progression bars that will fill up when completing an action that counts towards that challenge. Clicking this button will pop out a panel that will display all of your current challenges.

The news carousel has also been updated with a new look and more info. At the bottom of the menu you will see a familiar rotating carousel as before, but we now have the ability to share more info directly in your home screen when you click on that news item. Once selecting the item, it will open a panel on the right that will have detailed info.

NEW RANK DISPLAY

For the start of Year 2, we are changing a few things in the way that we display ranks. Firstly, the ranks in each tier will now go from four to one as you get closer to the next tier instead of one to four. For example, the lowest rank in the Gold tier will be Gold 4 and the highest will be Gold 1. The reason for the change is because we feel as though this is a more logical progression with regards to rankings, which normally are displayed in descending order.